On the Internet, social networks allow users to connect to and share information with each other. Many social networks include a content sharing aspect that allow users to upload, view, and share content, such as video content, image content, audio content, and so on. Other users of the social network may comment on the shared content, discover new content, locate updates, share content, and otherwise interact with the provided content. The shared content may include content from professional content creators, e.g., movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as content from amateur content creators, e.g., video blogging and short original videos.
A social network with content sharing capabilities may provide centralized locations for a content owner to showcase their content. These centralized locations are sometimes known as a channel, which is the representation of a user of the social network. The channel may be presented by the content sharing platform via one or more channel pages. The channel may be used by a content owner to convince new viewers to subscribe to the channel. Furthermore, a channel may be used by a content owner as a central location for subscribed viewers to comment on content, find the latest updates, and discover new content from the channel owner.
Currently, a social network may present to a user a listing (e.g., activity feed, feed, stream, wall, etc.) of objects (such as posts, content items (e.g., video, images, audio, etc.), status updates, favorability indications, tags, messages, and so on) generated by other users of the social network. The social network may rank these objects in the listing based on, for example, a determined relevance to the user. Various ranking algorithms may be utilized to generate this ranking of objects. One input to the ranking algorithm may be an affinity (e.g., frequency of contacts, variety of contacts, number of shared connections, etc.) between the viewing user and a user associated with the viewed object. Currently, the user that owns a viewed object (e.g, creates and posts the object) is determined for purposes of generating an affinity score between the viewing user and the viewed object.
However, due to the evolving nature of social networks, objects may be associated with more than one user. For example, a user of a social network may re-post an object posted by another user, resulting in both an original posting user of the object and the user that re-posted the object being associated with the object of the listing. Another example includes a user that posts an object and the multiple users that comment on that same object. In a further example, two or more social networks may merge together, resulting in multiple entities of the same user associated with an object. Current social network ranking algorithms do not reflect these multiple entities associated with an object when considering affinity with the viewing user for purposes of ranking the object.